Hotel California
by catastrophechao
Summary: It is the end of the world, and Yukio's in a bar. It is beginning to have a comfortable sense of repetition. This is the sequel to "How Far We've Come." I recommend you read that first, if you'd like this to make a little more sense.


Hotel California

* * *

It is the end of the world, and Yukio's in a bar. It is beginning to have a comfortable sense of repetition.

"How many chances do you think you get?" Satan is angry. Satan is always angry, these days. He manages it by contorting Rin's face into an ugly snarl and striking the table. It makes the whole room shake, and the crystal chandelier that didn't exist a moment ago jingles and jangles in distress.

"Temper," Yukio warns, placing a seven into the center cell of the lower right square on his Suduko grid. He won't eat or drink in these dreams, despite their setting, but there are other means of entertainment.

Satan snarls again, hissing like a teakettle, and lunges over the table. Behind him, the chandelier crashes to the ground beneath the weight of his rage, a thousand tiny prisms dashing against the floor and shattering in a parody of rain. Yukio thinks he might have found it pretty, had been in a position to appreciate it.

As it stands, Satan has the collar of Yukio's coat twisted tight in his fist, would be cutting off his air, if only Yukio had needed to breathe. Dreaming, and more than that, dreaming of being dead, has rendered Yukio's dependence on oxygen non-existent.

"This is getting tiresome," Satan growls into his face. "_You_ are getting_ tiresome_."

Yukio hangs there, a dead weight on Satan's inexhaustible strength, and gazes into eyes that ought to be familiar.

Dragon Ball Z is not Yukio's favorite anime, but it is the best way he can think of to explain this place. It is reminiscent of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber – he can spend years here, while in the real world, only hours tick by… Or maybe he has it backward. Maybe he has lived years in the real world, but keeps coming back again and again to this moment, stretching on into infinity. It's hard to gauge.

The dusting of broken glass from the chandelier has disappeared as if it never was. Satan calls objects to him on a whim, only to forget them a moment later. If Yukio doesn't set them into the dream, they vanish with little fanfare.

It's not as simple as he makes it sound. He must _believe_ things into permanence, and that is a double-edged sword. The first time Satan tore the head from a waitress's body in a fit of temper, Yukio couldn't stop staring, and the girl's corpse had staggered about the room, fountaining blood like a cartoon character until everyone and everything had been dripping crimson, painted red as the flowers in the Queen of Heart's garden. Satan had laughed and laughed and laughed. Yukio had woken up and been violently ill.

He has a better handle on it now.

"Patience is a virtue," Yukio reminds the Lord of Gehenna, who shakes him violently in response.

"You are going to come to regret this!" He releases Yukio with a snort of disgust, shoving him back into his chair, then grabs the half-finished Sudoku grid, crumples it into a tight little ball, and eats it. Yukio sighs, and stares at the empty table top until the slip of paper reappears, none the worse for wear, except…

Except, he could have _sworn_ that 3 was in the bottom left cell of the upper right quadrant, and he emknows /emthere wasn't a W anywhere on the page – it wasn't _Scrabble_.

Yukio looks up, "Really?"

Satan has adopted a look of carefully studied innocence. "I don't know what you're talking about." He says, as if Yukio hadn't just watched him devour a piece of newsprint.

Yukio sighs, and stuffs the vandalized puzzle away into his pocket.

* * *

Satan can believe anything. His ability to believe makes him all but omnipotent in the apocalyptic dreamscape he and Yukio share. Despite this, the master of evil operates primarily through small scale annoyances. For example: He likes to chew the erasers off Yukio's pencils. Sometimes he is obvious about it – the item in question disappearing from Yukio's grasp to reappear between Satan's sharp stolen teeth. Other times, the erasers are just gone – gnawed to ragged nubs – when Yukio moves to use one. Finally, and most disturbing, sometimes small disembodied mouths attach themselves to the end of the pencil while he is using it, to nibble busily on the rubber. They remind him of coal tars with teeth.

In addition to masticating his writing implements, Satan also takes Yukio's things, reads and comments upon Yukio's thoughts, chews with his mouth open, and hums. By the end of the first week, Yukio is beginning to think this thing is going to drive the both of them mad.

Assuming he isn't already. There's been some question of that, actually. His waking hours have been… confusing… of late, but that is a tale for another time, when the prince of darkness isn't stretching his brother's face out of shape with an ugly, overblown expression and getting flecks of spit on Yukio's glasses.

"I am _God_. There is no one and nothing beyond me. I am _everything_, the beginning and the end. _No one_ can withstand me."

Yukio has heard it before. He shuffles his cards. They are decorated, after countless nights of practice, with pictures of manga characters, and Ryoma Echizen smirks up at him from the king of clubs. Usually, when Satan goes off like this, Yukio continues with whatever he is doing, allowing the demon to rant himself out or become enraged enough at Yukio's casual disregard to flip the table and decapitate a bystander.

Tonight, he lays down the cards and looks up. "Shiro did." He says.

Satan sneers, Rin's hands twisting into claws that gouge the table, leaving ugly white scars in the wood. "That pathetic, weak-willed fool didn't know anything!" He rages. "He was no match for me. He was emnothing/em next to me. I _killed_ him!" He digs his fingers deeper, and his claws catch and stick in the tabletop. He snaps the edge off it to free them like he's breaking a piece from a biscuit. "I took _everything_ from him and then I _killed_ him."

"That's not how I heard it."

Shiro had killed himself; Satan was the reason, but not the cause.

"Don't _push_ me." Satan growls, and savages the table again. "You'll be the same soon enough, _my boy_." He is breathing hard, Rin's slim chest heaving. Mention of Shiro always gets him fired up, and Yukio wonders, not for the first time, what happened between them. What his father could have done, for Satan to hate him so.

* * *

In all the time they have been here, Satan has only really tried to kill Yukio once. It was in the beginning, when the both of them were still searching the edges of the dream, before Yukio got his feet under him. He had pushed things too far, somehow, or maybe Satan had just been having a bad day. Yukio doesn't remember that part, only what came after, only that Satan didn't even bother coming over the table.

One moment he was gnashing Rin's teeth, breath hissing between them like nothing that had ever been human, and the next Yukio's head had been between his hands. If Yukio ever dreamed of anything but _this_, he is certain he would dream of _that_ – the feel of Satan's claws as they punched through the paltry protection of his skull and into the hot damp dark of his brain. It hadn't killed him, not even in the dream. That was perhaps the most terrible part. He had just hung there on Satan's claws, while the King of Hell laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

When he had finally woken, it was with the worst headache of his life and blood soaked into his pillow. His nose was so crusted with it; he had to breathe through his mouth. He had dragged himself with painful slowness to the attached bathroom where he laid on the floor of the shower with the water on cold, fighting to remain conscious. The only thing that kept him awake was the fear of where he would find himself if he didn't.

It hasn't happened again since, though Yukio doesn't know why. He thinks maybe Satan is afraid to kill him – his one window into Assaih – or afraid he _can't_ kill him.

Yukio has learned that Satan is the sort of man who would sooner not play than risk losing, and Yukio is very good at believing himself alive.

Their abilities in the dream world are surprisingly equal. While Satan is certainly stronger - he forces things into and out of existence, makes them shatter and twist and moan- he lacks concentration. He lacks control. Yukio… does something else. And he has very fine control, indeed.

Under Yukio's power, the world becomes untouchable, intangible, as if it exists on yet another plane of existence. Satan can smash a thousand chandeliers, but when Yukio's got his balance, the shattered remains pass like a ghost through the scene, touching nothing and no one. Like Satan and Yukio themselves. It is when Satan catches him off his guard that things go badly.

And Yukio, too, can will objects into existence, but when he does, it is as if they've always been there. Rewritten into the script of the world. Satan does not care for this trick of his, and has more than once thrown the props that Yukio has summoned across the room or smashed them in a rage.

Yukio's strange mastery over everything beyond the two of them reminds Satan again and again and again: it is Yukio's dream.

* * *

"What will you do?" Yukio asks him, and Satan is right. He is pushing.

They both know what Satan can do. He can possess Yukio's body. That would put stop to this farce once and for all, and it would not be a difficult feat. Yukio is only human. The experience would kill him, and with it Satan's connection to Assaih, but Yukio doesn't think that is enough to stay his hand. Not on a night like this. No, there is something else that holds him back, and it isn't affection.

Yukio suspects Satan is afraid of becoming stuck. There's the possibility that Yukio, with his resistance to blue flames, his knowledge of the illuminati's experiments, his sheer bloody mindedness, could hold Satan. Not subdue him- Not even Shiro could do that - but bind his essence inexorably into Yukio's body, so that he was forced to remain, to rot and writhe as the flesh died around him.

Yukio can't pick up much of the demon's inner thoughts, that is a talent he does not possess, but he knows Satan does not wish to experience that again. He does not care for pain. As much as Satan craves a body, he is afraid of possession.

* * *

"Perhaps we'll come to an accord." Yukio had suggested once.

"I am not going to live in your defective human _eyes_." Satan had growled back, and flicked one of Yukio's chewed-up pencils at his face. "I am going to touch things, and eat things, and feel things, and you are going to do none of the above, because you are going to be _dead_."

"Are you sure about that?"

It was so easy to make him angry.

"You have _no_ idea."

Satan wants to live. Yukio understands that. Yukio wants to live, too, but not at the cost of the rest of the world.

* * *

Their third Friday here, Satan broke the table. Split it clean down the middle between his hands, like a giant cookie. Yukio half expected him to put it in his mouth. He was momentarily taken aback. Then he fixed it, in that way that he does, so that the table was not only whole now, but had _always_ been whole.

Satan had howled and shattered it again with a blow, except that it didn't happen. Instead the whole thing shivered and slide, like a splice in an old video recording, but the table remained, hale and healthy.

The look Satan turned on Yukio was more incredulous than angry. "Don't you _ever_ let _anything_ go?"

"Not really." Yukio fiddled with the napkin he didn't use, laying it smooth.

Satan bared his teeth. "Well," he had snapped, "_I_ am _leaving_!" And he had marched out the door in a huff.

Yukio could hear him crashing around in the apocalyptic landscape outside, probably setting fires and roasting people alive, but he didn't come back in for the rest of the night.

Yukio had considered ordering a pizza to celebrate, but in the end, decided it was better to be safe than sorry.

He had also learned something: when they were here, neither of them could escape.

* * *

Yukio wonders if there's a way to stay here forever. A pact he can trick Satan into making, to bind the both of them into this facsimile of life.

Satan's lips curl back with each harsh, unnecessary breath, and Rin's fangs gleam in the dim light.

Yukio hears a thump, the sound of something solid but not hard hitting the ground, and then another, and another, until they come one with the chaotic regularity of popcorn kernals. Thud, thud, th-thud-ud, thud-thud. The girls at the next table over collapse in tandem, one of them falls out of her chair to the floor, the other topples face first into her salad. They lie limp and lifeless, like puppets with their strings cut. And then their heads explode. Blood and brain matter gets on Yukio's napkin, his glasses, Ryoma's face. He does not move to wipe it away. Just gazes into Satan's furious blue eyes, which are getting hotter and angrier with every second that passes.

Somewhere behind him, Shima changes the song on the jukebox. In the momentary quiet, he can hear Mamushi's sister laugh.

Amidst the carnage, Yukio's people remain standing, unaware of how the landscape has changed around them, innocent in their dream.

He will not believe them to be any other way.

"You can't really save them." Satan says, smirking. It looks small and mean on his stolen face. "They're already dead."

"I'm working on that." Yukio says. In his daylight hours, he has been learning all he can about possession.

"Are you now?" Satan surveys the room, taking in the bodies of all the people he has killed, the people Yukio did not save. "What a beautiful dream you have."

Yukio picks up the cards and begins to deal. "Two-ten-jack?"

Satan narrows his eyes, but picks gathers his cards from what's left of the table. "Oh, the things I am going to do to you." he breathes, coiling on his chair like a snake readying to strike.

Yukio only hopes Satan doesn't kill him before he finds out what he needs to know.


End file.
